The Internet

A LITTLE ARPANET & The "Interface Messaging Processor"

Click Image to Enlarge: Kleinrock & His IMP

Click Image to Enlarge: Log of 1st successful message from IMP to IMP

The 1st ARPANET IMP log was a record of the first message ever sent over the ARPANET. This message occurred at 10:30 PM on October 29th, 1969. This IMP log was kept at UCLA and shows a message transmission that went from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer.

"The" ARPANET first consisted of 4 IMP's:

UCLA (where Leonard Kelinrock set up his Network Measurement Center and hooked up a SDS Sigma 7 computer to it.

The Stanford Research Institute had the Augmentation Research Center where Douglas Engelbart set up his NLS hypertext system (Genie) that used the SDS 940 Host computer.

Finally there was the University of Utah's Computer Science Department where Ivan Sutherland had set up a DEC PDP-10 running TENEX.

The first message ever sent over the ARPANET was a "host to host" connection sent by a UCLA student programmer named Charley Kline, supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock.

Kleinrock's SDS Sigma 7 computer sent to the SRI SDS 940 computer a message intended to be the word "login". They got the "L" and the "o" and then the set-up "crashed". So: the first message on the ARPANET" was "Lo". One hour later, a full login was successful.

The 1st permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969 between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at SRI. Then, by December 5th, 1969, the entire 4 Unit Network was connected. When hooked up: something else happened...

Multiple thousands of connections were also opened... way beyond the amount of people even available and able to connect at the time. No official explanation has yet been offered to explain this anomaly.

The first e-mail was sent in 1971 and was a generic typed conglomerate of letters sent by one Ray Tomlinson who sent the e-mail between 2 computers sitting side by side.

At first, there was a series of memos by JCR Licklider (of Bolt, Beranek & Newman) discussing his ideas for an "Intergalactic Computer Network". What Licklider was doing thinking about an "Intergalactic" network back in August of 1962, who knows?

But in October of 1963, Liklider was appointed head of the Behavioral Sciences & Command & Control programs at "ARPA"... which was the US Dept. of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). While there, he influenced Ivan Sutherland and Bob Taylor.

Then, at NPL, on August 5th, of 1968, a public demo took place of "packet switching". All these ideas, etc. "gelled".... funding was narrowed down to two companies and eventually BBN Technologies got the bid on 7 April 1969 to set up a network of "IMPS"s and its eventual "deployment" resulted in the first logged in message" shown above.